Fear Not These Murals: Brian Rea's Art Is What Keeps Him Up at Night

What's your worst fear? Ignorance? Credit cards? Smallpox? Illustrator Brian Rea has collected so many fears over the years that they fill up a 7-meter-by-3.5-meter wall. An exhibition entitled Murals that opened at the Joan Miró Foundation in Barcelona last week gave Rea a chance to not only face, but also trace, his worst fears.

Rea keeps many lists. During his last year in New York (2008) he began taking inventory of the things he and other people around him were worried about. "After being there for 11 years, I discovered like most people I had a lot of fears—after a few months, I began to catalog them: physical fears, natural fears, political fears, random, emotional."

Rea categorized the fears into themes like physical, political, and of course, supernatural.

On the opposite wall, Rea took one of his fears—UFOs—and expanded upon the topic visually. "I spent a few months researching UFO sightings and reports from the last 50 years," he says.

"This is an archive of some of the more interesting and unusual ones," says Rea. "Where the intersection of fear, storytelling and drawing overlaps with people's
imagination."

Rea used chalk and white paint to create the two murals, which took about 13 days to complete. The show will be up until June 6 and the two murals are located, appropriately, along a long, dark, scary hallway.

I always "shallac" every piece of work I do.Shallac it pretty much just a clear coat that comes in a spray can, its affordable and you can get it at any art store, it doesn't ruin the painting at all, it just makes it a little shiny. wii softmod